More than almost anyone else alive, Michael Morell knows the secrets of U.S. national security. Over the past two decades, the former deputy director of the CIA has played a central role in the nation’s biggest counterterrorism events, starting with the response to 9/11. In his new book, The Great War of Our Time: The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism From Al Qa’ida to ISIS, he draws on this experience to deliver warnings for the future. On Monday, Morell spoke with Politico Magazine National Editor Michael Hirsh.

Michael Hirsh: So, tell us what drove you to write this book.

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Michael Morell: I‘m deeply concerned we’re going to get hit in the homeland again, and there’s a significant chance that tomorrow there could be another ISIS-inspired attack. But there’s also a chance that AQAP or even al Qaeda in Yemen could bring down an airliner. They’ve got that kind of capability. If we don’t keep pressure on the terrorists, they are going to rebound until they’re able to conduct another 9/11-style attack. One of the reasons I wrote the book is that I wanted American people to know that.

Hirsh: What kinds of attacks on the homeland do you most worry about?

Morell: Two things. No. 1, I worry about an AQAP attack that is significant in that it kills hundreds of people. I think the most likely thing is a specialized explosive that brings down an airliner in the United States. I really worry about that. The last three attempted attacks on the homeland were by AQAP. The other thing I worry about is a directed attack by ISIS or al Nusra or Khorasan or al Qaeda in Pakistan or AQAP, or even al Qaeda in Yemen, which is you get ten or 15 guys and send them into malls on a Saturday with single weapons and have them kill 10 or 20 or 25 people. That would be devastating … Having al Shabaab talk about attacking malls and encouraging radicals in the United States to attack malls really worries me.

Hirsh: You also wrote the book to set people straight on the CIA, correct?

Morell: There are three myths out there about the agency. One, we are James Bond, and we can do anything. That’s a myth. The other myth out there is the New York Times myth—that we can’t get anything right. Then there’s the myth that we’re rogue, which was one of problems with Senate Intelligence Committee report on Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. All of those things are myths. The reality is that these are incredibly dedicated people … and we get many things right but we also make mistakes.

Hirsh: That Senate Intelligence Committee report concluded that President George W. Bush and other senior officials—including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for a time and Secretary of State Colin Powell—were not aware of many details of the interrogation programs for a long period. How could that be?

Morell: Here’s what happened. [Then-CIA Director] Leon Panetta gave them [the Senate committee] access to nearly every document at the CIA. But the White House declared executive privilege on documents that related to interactions between the CIA and the White House. They didn’t have those, so they never saw all of the conversations and interactions between the CIA and the White House. They just assumed they never happened. That’s really, really poor analysis on their part.

Hirsh: Let’s talk about some news this week. The new Saudi king will not be attending President Obama’s summit at Camp David. Isn’t that a terrible blow to Obama and an indication of a serious rift between the two countries?

Morell: I’d be a little careful in saying that this is an intentional snub. We may learn in next 24 or 48 hours that it’s really health reasons or something. … But having said that, there is deep, deep frustration on the part of our Sunni Arab allies in the Middle East with U.S. policy. They are deeply concerned about Iran and the challenges it poses. To them Iran is a much bigger threat than al Qaeda and ISIS. They’re worried about us from two perspectives. Are we taking Iran as seriously as we should? And are we as focused on Iran’s regional behavior as we are on the nuclear program? The deeper fear they have is that over time the United States sees Iran as a more natural partner than the Sunni Arabs. You see these deep concerns reflected in what they say and do. My view, strongly held, is that we should be helping them push back against the Iranian desire for dominance in the region.

Hirsh: You don’t think we’re doing a good enough job of that?

Morell: No, I don’t.

Hirsh: The investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is out with a new article in the London Review of Books that says the U.S. has been lying about the bin Laden mission—that in fact the Pakistanis knew all about it beforehand.

Morell: I read about a third of it, and then I actually put it down, because everything I read was wrong. His source has no idea what he’s talking about. … First of all it’s not true that we paid some Pakistani $25 million to tell us where Osama bin Laden was. It’s absolutely not true. The story of us following the courier to get to bin Laden is the true story. … I sat in the situation room when the president made the decision not to tell the Pakistanis.

Hirsh: You devote a substantial amount of space in the book to Benghazi. You write that in the months leading up to the Benghazi attack on Sept. 11, 2012, there were roughly 20 attacks on at the consulate in Benghazi, or the Temporary Mission Facility as it’s called, where Amb. Chris Stevens was later killed. You say the CIA reevaluated its security posture in Benghazi after that but it’s unclear why State did not do more. Can you explain?

Morell: I know very little of what happened with regard to the security at the State Department facility. … The CIA is not responsible for State Department security. We’re responsible for our own. The interesting thing is our security guys did their job. They saw the deteriorating security situation in in eastern Libya and in Benghazi. They looked at the security of our facility. They said it’s not good enough given the changing security situation. They did all of that without the direction of or even knowledge of Director [David] Petraeus and me. That all happened well below us and that’s exactly where it should have happened.

That’s the kind of thing that at the CIA at least is delegated down the food chain. … The security at our place was pretty good. It withstood the first attack. It drove the bad guys away the first time, and it was only when they came back with mortars that it was clear the security wasn’t going to hold. When somebody is coming at you with mortars only one way to deal with that. And that’s with counter-battery fire. And that’s the kind of thing that happens in a war zone. … I thought my guys from a security perspective did a great job. I don’t know what happened at the State department in terms of people paying attention to it, how high all that went.…

Hirsh: Was the CIA and U.S. government naïve about what was happening in Libya? Inattentive to the threats, particularly about how things were going to play out after Qaddafi was killed?

Morell: I don’t think it was inattention. One of the stories I tell in the book is that the president sent me to try to make sure these guys [Libyan government officials] understood what was happening to their country. One of the problems was not going into it with a very detailed plan for how you were going to maintain stability. ... We never really had a conversation around the table about what’s going to happen, how It's going to look. The intelligence community never wrote that paper… That conversation was not as rich and rigorous as it should have been.

Hirsh: Did the conversation occur at all?

Morell: It did occur a little bit, at the State Department and Defense Department. But it didn’t have the kind of rigor and structure that the military strategy had. … In Iraq it was actually worse. We actually made things worse with de-Baathification. At least in the case of Libya we didn’t do anything that made it worse. We just didn’t do anything to make it better.